The Artist's "Disorderly Humanity": Torres Bodet's La educación sentimental

Through his literary criticism and experimental novels, Jaime Torres Bodet, a member of Mexico's Contemporáneos group, participated in vanguardist debates about the interaction between art and human experience. Specifically, he initiated, as I have noted, a dialogue with Ortega y Gasset's La deshumanización del arte . These concerns are fully explored in his second novel, La educación sentimental (1929; The Sentimental Education), the story of a would-be writer who studies the interaction of art and life that shapes individual styles. But the debate had already been joined in Torres Bodet's first novel, Margarita de niebla, through the protagonist's self-contemplative scene evoking the Orteguian windowpane-garden metaphor, a scenario I have described in this chapter's opening lines. In a 1928 critique of Ortega's work explicitly entitled "La deshumanización del arte," moreover, Torres Bodet took issue with Ortega's assessment that modern aesthetic sensibility derived from a "triumph over the human" and defended a place in contemporary aesthetics for contact with the very "disorderly humanity" that, the Mexican writer asserted, Ortega would "exile from the work of art" (Contemporáneos 127, 123).^[18] There is no art, Torres Bodet insisted, without a "struggle" with the "human mat-

ter" that it stylizes (Contemporáneos 127–28). On the same note, he affirmed in the 1928 essay "La poesía nueva" that "reality itself will always be the support and the pretext for the work of art" (Contemporáneos 29).

In his own prose fiction, but most explicitly in La educación sentimental, Torres Bodet explored these issues further, reinforcing the position that art and experience interact with and shape one another. In his study of the Hispanic vanguard novel, Pérez Firmat suggests that this work may be read either literally as a "slight" Bildungsroman or allegorically as a response to Ortega's ideas on the lack of transcendence in modern art (76).^[19] Pursuing the second of these options, he then argues that La educación sentimental shows how the "perfect poem" produced by an autonomous conception of art "cannot shield itself from the impure substance of life" (77) and, conversely, that the novel protagonist's life experience is shaped by what he reads. I propose a reading that expands on Pérez Firmat's work and, at the same time, shifts its emphasis. I am particularly interested here in how the novel's narrating artist protagonist seeks to construct an artistic self by analyzing how his mentors' life experiences are marked by a particular artistic style. "Style" in this novel's idiom refers to a means of artistic expression that is both individual and marked by historical periods and generic conventions. Bürger argues that the absence of a characteristic style constitutes a distinguishing feature of the historical avant-gardes. Instead, the vanguards made available the artistic means of all periods, and it is only through this "universal availability" that artistic means, or styles, become recognizable as such (18). Torres Bodet's protagonist in La educación sentimental manifests this recognition, as he draws on his mentors' styles and examines how different artistic styles—neoclassical, romantic, or Spanish American modernista —interact with ordinary experience.

On the most accessible level, La educación sentimental presents the account of an adolescent friendship critical for its autobiographical narrator's maturation. The more experienced and literate Alejandro provides a model for the overprotected and unformed narrator-protagonist. Key moments include a separation between the friends when the narrator, vacationing in Cuautla, seeks to construct a more solid sense of self and the discovery when he visits Alejandro's home uninvited that this cultured young man is a prostitute's son. As in El juguete rabioso, Bildungsroman markers are evident: adolescence, school, parental and peer mentors, separation and self-contemplation in an idyllic setting,

and loss of innocence. The narrator-protagonist's artistic aspirations also suggest the artist's story or Künstlerroman, a context reinforced by discussions of his readings. But despite these familiar elements reinforced by the title from Flaubert's novel, Torres Bodet's work devotes scant attention to the narrator's development as an individual. If El juguete rabioso undermines the artist's solidity through an elusively situated narrative voice, here the nameless narrating protagonist is enveloped by unanswered questions. Instead of clarifying identities, an ambiguous Cervantine "preamble" cloaks the artistic persona in anonymity and directs the reader's attention to the problem of literary style. Here an unidentified publisher-narrator introduces the work and its nameless narrator-protagonist. The latter, a childhood friend and a "failed poet," has been rediscovered as a fifty-year-old teacher in the school where he was once a student. This teacher, the reader surmises, embodies the autobiographical voice that speaks in the chapters that follow. The work itself is introduced as the teacher's youthful diary, turned over to the preamble's narrator to be published at its author's request.^[20]

The preamble draws significant links between this "found manuscript" and its "found" author. Both are cloaked in the ambiguity of the preamble's opening line: "I don't know if I might affirm that the author of this notebook—biographic?—might really have been my friend" (101). Both are texts to be read, moreover: the diary is enclosed in a notebook (a cuaderno ) and its author's face, "bookish and positive like Spencer's" and "scrupulously bound" (encuadernado ) by sideburns, exhibits a comparable learned facade (101). In addition, discrepancies between the preamble and the text it introduces—entitled La educación sentimental —suggest that both the manuscript and its author have undergone change. Though the preamble's narrator-publisher reports that he has found his childhood friend unaltered, he also characterizes the diary's author paradoxically as capable of "a permanent apprenticeship" (101). If Silvio Astier's failed dreams of grandeur in El juguete rabioso yield to fabricating a personal style, opening assertions in Torres Bodet's novel intimate that this learning process is also a stylistic apprenticeship. Although the preamble describes the volume as a diary, for example, the actual telling of La educación sentimental unfolds not through the alternating intercalated narrative of a diary but through an ulterior narration of youthful moments, a temporal structure reinforced by such references as "in those years" (118) contrasting with allusions to "in our time" (104). Thus, if the work really began as

a diary, it has been subjected to subsequent editorial intervention, and its autobiographical narrator hints retrospectively that he is responsible, with a reference to his expressive development: "if I had known how to express myself then with the words with which I do now" (111). Intimating the evolution of a literary style, this comment suggests that, through maturation, the narrator, like his notebook, has been "rewritten." The possibility, of a stylistic apprenticeship is reinforced by a contradiction the reader immediately perceives between the "honorable poverty" of style attributed by the preamble to the manuscript and the stylistic richness of the document that follows. In fact, the marked stylistic similarities between the preamble and the manuscript it introduces suggest that the preamble's narration represents a self-reflexive doubling on the part of the manuscript's autobiographical narrator, a move that reinforces the self-contemplatory stance of La educación sentimental itself.

In keeping with the preamble's focus on style, the text's principal narrator engages in meticulous retrospective readings of the mentors, his parents and Alejandro, who have shaped his own stylistic apprenticeship. Like Silvio in El juguete rabioso, the narrator is immersed in his surroundings, the city streets he wanders with Alejandro, and engaged with the people he encounters in the neighborhood and his parents' home. But his focus on style mediates this interaction with his environment. In contrast to the Argentine novel and in keeping with the Contemporáneos group's eschewal of overt social commentary, this work includes few concrete Mexico City referents. Like El juguete rabioso, La educación sentimental also plays with its sources through literary allusion, parodic appropriation, and the same Bakhtinian "autocriticism of discourse" that pits Silvio's idealized models against his life. But here this "ancestral critique," to paraphrase Pérez Firmat, becomes the center of the artist's story and manifests Torres Bodet's concern with the interaction of art with life. The narrator in La educación sentimental examines, with a humorously critical eye, how each of his mentors stylizes ordinary experience by filtering it through specific aesthetic traditions. His mother provokes the narrator's initial awareness of this process. She selects her children's associates with care, "until ... having completely assimilated them ... to the particular mode of the house and the fundamental norms of her style" (110). Faithful to her French origins, the mother embodies a neoclassical spirit, and the narrator sees in her the source for whatever degree of tidy classicism he may possess. Although she seldom writes more than letters, she has inherited "the

rigor of good prosody)," (110), a talent she applies to everyday life. His mother, the narrator notes, engages in a very specific strategy: "to reduce the human material to the perfect—but undoubtedly impoverished—proportions of the too strict Ars Poética, in whose angles I later recognized, upon reading Boileau, their unquestionable origin" (110). The mother privileges style over content, for she accepts adversarial viewpoints if they are forged with "the elegance of correct elocution" (111). Her tutelage, the narrator suggests, has best prepared him to be a piano tuner, for the "mechanical uniformity" of her expressions (117) and her "typographical voice" (125) have served not only to censor his youthful readings but also to eliminate any false notes he might emit. In the neoclassical spirit, she tolerates idiosyncrasy by assimilating troublesome difference into generality, recognizing in the "singularities" of all people "the appearance of a general virtue" (110).

Also a product of the Enlightenment, the narrator's father exhibits more of its romantic spirit and modern tensions. In contrast to the mother, the father approaches the raw material of life with the zeal of a modern collector. As a "man of the Encyclopedia," he sometimes does bring to his collections the "minutiae" of the entomologist and "the systems and the fever of the cataloguer" (108–109). But although he began by collecting stamps, the father's assemblages begin to manifest the tensions between order and chaos that Walter Benjamin ascribed to all collections ("Unpacking My Library" 60). Thus the narrator compares the disorderly state of his father's collections to a novelist's style, a conception reminiscent of Silvio Astier's vanguardist talent in El juguete rabioso for larceny and assembled fabrications: "that vague aptitude to gather poems, figures, objects, cigarette rings, medallion profiles, comedies of manners, women, dates, keys and fans that lies dormant in the depths of every good novelist and constitutes the charm of every good thief (108; my emphasis).

The father's most serious collection, the anthology of his friendships, exhibits his talent for discerning the exotic within the banal. Unlike his wife, who assimilates friends into the neoclassical order of her household, the father seeks out eccentricities in his friends' most mundane habits, qualities amenable to the caricature of a critical eye. Thus one friend is selected for the "perfect bad taste" of his jackets, another, a golfer, for the singular way in which he lands four lumps of sugar in his tea at a single swing (109). In keeping with romanticism's primitivist mode, the father singles out his female friends as replacements for his own "lost animality" and selects them not for their beauty but for their

"fury, sensuality, or gluttony" (109). While the mother tolerates and even erases difference by absorbing it into her worldview, the father possesses a modern propensity for exposing difference through curious juxtapositions. Thus the narrator greatly admires his father's novelistic gatherings of miscellany or his collection of rare tuberoses with obscure Latin names that might be provocatively combined, the narrator notes, by surrealist poets. Similarly, the narrator concludes that his father's singular storytelling style derives from the ability to superimpose temporal planes into a single simultaneous moment.

But the mysterious Alejandro presents the narrator's most important model, and deciphering his friend's style is critical in identifying and constructing a style of his own. Decidedly unique, Alejandro is the only one to appear "handwritten" among the other students, "an ensemble of mechanical copies" (104). Still, his style resembles the mother's in its propensity for order. He is "tidy," "moderated," and "orthographic" (144). He shares the mother's correct elocution, and she admires his "precise lucidity" (112). Alejandro writes clean and "modest" school compositions (122), and his prose, which the narrator attempts to imitate in his youth, is "transparent, temperate and angularly cerebral," his style "logically mature" (121). He selects exact topics for his compositions and applies to them the "precise sharpness" of titles almost modern in their succinctness (122).

For the narrator, however, there is much in Alejandro, including the inexplicable reserve about family, that simply does not coalesce. Alejandro is, in fact, the character in La educación sentimental who most palpably embodies Torres Bodet's focus on the interaction between art and human experience. The narrator is most intrigued by an apparent incongruity between Alejandro's style and his substance, and this quality intensifies the narrator's concern with the interaction between a style and a life. This gap is manifested in Alejandro's physical demeanor with imagery that suggests a form-content tension. His fragile heels are too thin for his very thick shoes, and, in the boxing ring, his body seems to disguise his great strength. In addition, there is something too natural in his modesty resembling an "artful spring," a quality that for the narrator seems to blur the boundaries between artifice and spontaneity, imposing the strategies of art on life (106).

While the parents embody the narrator's classical and romantic stylistic inheritance, with the latter pointing toward its legacy to the vanguards, Alejandro's qualities recall more immediate antecedents, the Spanish American modernista tradition. Changing from camaraderie to

eventual distance, the narrator's connection with his friend embodies the would-be artist's coming to terms with the modernismo legacy. Alejandro's conversation is peppered with obscure aesthetic allusions, his name hints at one of the modernista poet's favorite verse forms (the alejandrino ), and his physical description harbors a paradigmatic modernista motif, the interrogating neck of a swan: "He sustained an abstract head ... on the bough of an elegant but indecisive neck, like a vague question mark" (103). In addition, Alejandro wants to be an architect and, like the modernista writer, is concerned with ornamentation and formal perfection, qualities the narrator ascribes to his voice, his expressive means: "every inflection now seemed to me the project of a form: the unfolded fan of a staircase, the charming perspective of a window, the are and the foliage, dense, of a column" (116). The title's allusion to Flaubert and the preamble's invocation of the French novelist as a mentor reinforce Alejandro's modernist aura, for, as I have noted, Aníbal González has documented convincingly that modernista prose writers, like Flaubert, compared the "immense and tenacious" labors of art to that of "the craftsman in his workshop" (21).^[21] But Alejandro's most intriguing quality in the narrator's eyes is the disjunction between the "great calligraphic pulchritude" of his personal presence and the "eternal litigation of languages" and the "confused urban paragraph" that define the neighborhood of his origins (143). This discordant note in Alejandro's persona points precisely to what Gwen Kirkpatrick has termed modernismo 's "dissonant legacy" to developments in art that followed. The contradiction also reiterates Torres Bodet's own concern with the interaction between art and life. As González has shown, modernista novels portrayed artists engaged in anguished vacillations between aestheticist, intellectual strivings and life in a turbulent world (31–52), stresses that were laid bare and intensified in vanguardist experience.

Through this retrospective scrutiny of his mentors' styles, the narrator begins to identify an emerging style of his own. He calls attention to this process of constructing a self through the contemplation of others, as he stares at his mother's aging photograph and perceives in it "the gallery of my successive images as a child, as an adolescent and as a mature man" (107). But, as with Silvio's self-fabrication in Arlt's novel, the developmental process intimated here is again more a matter of personal style than of individual substance. The narrator recalls that during the Cuautla vacation he first became aware of his own lack of

originality and (like Silvio's thievery) his plagiaristic proclivities. As Pérez Firmat has noted, the narrator worries about his propensity for imitation (Idle Fictions 79). His speech, his toys, even his illnesses, he recalls, are identical to those of his friends, and he once even pilfered his language teacher's collection of tildes. This imitative dexterity was responsible, he feared, for his lack of "interior consistency" (126). In this novel's expressive system, however, interior consistency is grounded in a personal style. Significantly, the narrator's emergent sense of self in Cuautla is manifested in narcissistic hours of staring into a well, and the intensification of a highly subjective narration is accompanied by a growing "will to style" (to borrow Ortega's term). The narrator imagines, for example, altering the surrounding landscape with a "touch of shade" here or "a bit more green" there (139). This stylistic awareness becomes a fundamental component of the mature narrator's own style. Thus he appears at times to be more of an artistic critic than the artist he aspires to be, a critic who foregrounds the process of stylization itself in which experience is constructed through the worldviews of specific styles. By exposing this process and bringing varied styles into contiguity, the narrator engages in a typically vanguardist activity that, like Silvio Astier's fabrications, undermines stylistic hierarchies and emphasizes a process over a product or finished-work conception of art.^[22]

This narrator is also an aspiring novelist, however. He seeks a narrative style through which to filter his experience as he reflects on "how difficult it would be to explain all of this in the chapter of a novel" (137). Steering away from the maternal example, the narrator seeks to avoid an over stylization of experience that might impoverish the raw material of life. He notes, for example, the importance of alternating in his own expression "the improvised pleasures of the fantastic" with "the delicious sense of the true" (115). He is bothered by Alejandro's austere literary allusions that, because of "the protective simplicity of the words," seem to be lacking in "the minimum of human meaning" (119–20). And it is precisely his overly formalized dialogues with Alejandro—"a closed world like the perfect poem" (116)—that lead him away from his friend and this modernismo goal for aesthetic perfection. Significantly, the narrator has been most intrigued by his friend's "dissonant legacy," that is, those features of his Alejandro experience that will not fit into the perfect poem's closed world: the fragile heels that the thick shoes will not accommodate, his friend's preference for un-

bound books, the mysteries of his background, and, most important, the rambling "incoherences" and "contradictions" harbored by the deceptively perfect poem of their conversations (138).

Concerned that his own style maintain some of these disorderly incongruities of experience, the narrator produces a text, La educación sentimental, that combines a penchant for unusual metaphors with a digressive baroque narration, a text that points to its own lack of perfection. Dominant metaphors render characters as material, often graphic, elements of language. These include the handwritten Alejandro, the mechanically copied (typewritten) students, the confused urban paragraph of Alejandro's world, a misplaced character identified as an "erraturn" (146), and the family's vacation time female neighbors, the "five vowels" of Cuautla (128). Grounded in orthography, calligraphy, and phonology, these metaphors suggest a circumscription of experience through linguistic norms and representational modes. But with a proclivity for baroque syntax and metaphoric accumulation, the narrator's prose, like the narrator himself walking the city, tends to wander away from such tidy comparisons. Thus, although Alejandro is originally depicted as handwritten like a penmanship exercise, a subsequent image suggests a more idiosyncratic, languid motion, still reminiscent of writing on a page but distorted as through a slow-motion film. The narrator describes how each of Alejandro's movements "displaced in the air the volume acquired from the previous ones, letting the following ones slide, without haste, down the slope of a velocity that went and came neutral, isochronous, gentle, from one side to the other of the contest, like the hammock of a languor" (104).

Interestingly, the narrator appears to cultivate these metonymic meanderings to preserve in his prose something of the disorderly urban world that he and Alejandro have explored. Although he hails from a far more comfortable milieu than Silvio Astier, as in El juguete rabioso, the narrator's wanderings about the city with his friend—to poorer sections and the red-light district—provide a key element in his education. And although concrete geographic references are infrequent, the sense of a recognizable ambience as in Cuautla also reinforces the notion of an artist's engagement with a surrounding world. As with Silvio, moreover, these vagaries metonymically shape this narrator's metaphors.^[23] Thus his own conversation disrupts the friendship's perfect poem: "I liked to ... depart from a point established beforehand and move away from it, little by little, thanks to a series of conclusions without continuity" (118). The father's conversational style, a fundamental model for

the narrator, manifests a similar tension between poetic image and rambling impulse: "his conversation flowed in the manner of the picture on those kimonos in whose silk people's names do not suppress them but rather contain them with the discretion of a portrait that is, at the same time, a monogram" (134–35). This graphic image, the monogram, embodies a spatial figure that, in contrast to modernismo 's closed poem, is simultaneously open and closed. The image also suggests a flowing prose style that, like the kimono's silk writing, will contain life's "disorderly humanity" without totally enclosing it. A similar tension between poetic containment and proselike digression is expressed through the image of an arabesque, a form not unlike the monogram in its ambiguous circumscription of space.

Y es que la educación, un poco escolástica, en que las conversaciones con Alejandro me habían ido envolviendo estaba tan llena de incoherencias y de contradicciones sutiles que yo mismo me extraviaba en ella como en el plano de esas ciudades del centro de España con cuyo trazo, de musicales arabescos, no pude abstenerme de compararla cuando las conocí. Antiguas, abandonadas y en desorden, ninguna simetría las contiene, pero ningún sistema las sacrifica . (138; my emphasis)

(And it seems that the education, somewhat scholastic, in which the conversations with Alejandro had been enclosing me was so full of incoherencies and subtle contradictions that I myself would become lost in it like in the map of those cities of central Spain with whose outline, of musical arabesques, I could not refrain from comparing it when I made their acquaintance. Ancient, abandoned and in disorder, no symmetry contains them, but no system sacrifices them .)

A comparable language of boundaries and digressions informs Torres Bodet's essay "Reflexiones sobre la novela" (1928). Modern novelistic writing had a debt to poetry, he observed, in a new kind of metaphoric description, "rich in oppositions." But through the modern novel, he asserted, the issue of style in art had shifted its center from a "form of expression" to a "form of exploration" (Contemporáneos 15), that is, from product to process. Through the poematic prose of La educación sentimental, the artist follows such an exploratory path. In the work's final scene, while walking slowly homeward, the narrator selects a strolling couple to follow at a distance. The description of this act points directly to his own emerging style: "And I continued to follow them in a kind of leisurely, vagabond play that—despite the journey—possessed nothing of the active risks of the hunt but rather the immobile risk of fishing that like the dream—or like poetry—does not pursue but waits for its discoveries" (153; my emphasis). Thus the nar-

rator's style combines the chance metaphoric discoveries of his lyric inheritance with the "leisurely vagabond play" of a meandering prose that, like an arabesque or a monogram, seeks to stylize life without containing it.

Although the works are quite different in language and tone, the portrait of an artist constructed by La educación sentimental possesses meaningful points of contact with the artistic persona emerging from El juguete rabioso . This nameless protagonist remains elusive as an identifiable personality and lacks "interior consistency." Instead, the novel presents the "formation" promised by the Bildungsroman markers as the construction of a literary style. As in the development of Silvio Astier, this process includes a critical confrontation with the protagonist's surroundings as well as with inherited traditions. But here the confrontation with sources is more direct, as the narrator, with the sharp eye of a literary critic, displays and disassembles his role models to discern how each filters experience through style. The effect is an often humorous, critical view of the characters themselves and of the styles they embody.

The artist figure that emerges here engages in the activity of a discerning reader and critic who scrutinizes the styles of others. This portrayal of the artist as reader, moreover, establishes parallels with the novel's own implied reader, characterized by this work as one who would undertake a similar critical enterprise. Although in vanguardist novels the relationship is usually more subtly drawn, this conflation of artist and reader is also typical of the vanguardist manifesto. As I show in the chapter on manifestos, these documents simultaneously assault and court an imagined audience and often construct a recipient in the speaker's own image. Implicitly anticipating contemporary debates about art, its contexts, and interpretive activity, La educación sentimental poses a model for critical reading that is exclusively neither extrinsic nor intrinsic. More concretely, the model calls for the critic (the narrator-protagonist) to focus solely on neither the text (the mentor's style) nor the context (the mentor's experience and times) but rather on the interaction between the two.

To construct his own literary style, then, the artist narrator in La educación sentimental draws on those qualities of his antecedents that maintain something of a "disorderly" context: the modernista "dissonance" in Alejandro between his overformalized style and his substance, the father's miscellaneous collections and the temporal superimpositions of his storytelling style. In the same mode, the narrator self-consciously absorbs into his own style something of his incongruent life

in the very world he is scrutinizing, including the "leisurely, vagabond play" of his own meanderings through the city. At the heart of this narrator's activity, is the work's refusal to separate sharply the domains of art and life. La educación sentimental reveals the dynamic relation between the Orteguian windowpane and garden through eyes that, optical limitations notwithstanding, struggle to focus on both. Thus as he critiques the styles of his mentors, the would-be artist narrator constructs his own tenuous interior consistency through a poematic prose style that exposes both the artifice shaping his human models and the irrepressible "disorderly humanity" impinging on his aesthetic ones.